Key takeaways
- Collaboration costs about 12.8 days to first publish, against roughly 3 hours for a solo author. Every co-author adds a review cycle, a calendar, and a round of comments.
- Courses with three or more authors reach 3.4 times more learners on average, 635 against 187 for a solo course.
- Completion looks lowest for the largest author groups, on average, and highest once you weight by learner numbers. The anomaly is about which courses get co-authors, not about collaboration hurting quality.
- The decision comes down to matching process to stakes. A course for a small team rarely needs the review cycle. A course reaching hundreds of people usually does.
Where these figures come from
Figures come from an Easygenerator platform dataset of 213,660 created courses and 22.9 million learner-course interactions, recorded between June 2025 and June 2026. The author-count analysis covers 45,214 courses with at least 5 learner results.
Full method sits in the 2026 e-learning benchmark report.
What collaboration actually costs
The key point. A solo author publishes in about 3 hours. Two authors take 7.1 days. Three or more take 12.8 days.
Courses with a single author on the Easygenerator platform reached first publish in about 3 hours. Courses with two authors took 7.1 days, and courses with three or more took 12.8 days.
| 1 author | 2 authors | 3 or more authors | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Courses measured | 78,797 | 16,602 | 10,120 |
| Typical time to first publish | About 3 hours | 7.1 days | 12.8 days |
The time difference is large enough that it deserves an explanation rather than a defense. A solo author publishes in an afternoon because nobody has to wait on anybody. Every co-author adds a review cycle, a calendar to align, and a round of comments to work through.
What collaboration buys
The key point. Courses with three or more authors reach 3.4 times more learners than solo courses, on average.
Solo courses reached an average of 187 learners. Courses with two authors reached 280. Courses with three or more authors reached 635, about 3.4 times the solo figure.
| 1 author | 2 authors | 3 or more authors | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Courses measured | 31,805 | 8,086 | 5,323 |
| Average learners per course | 187 | 280 | 635 |
3.4x
Courses built by three or more authors on the Easygenerator platform reached an average of 635 learners, about 3.4 times the 187 learners reached by courses built by a single author.
Easygenerator platform data, 45,214 courses, June 2025 to June 2026.
Teams do not appear to add co-authors at random. The reach figures suggest they add them to the courses that matter most. A course that several hundred people will take earns a review cycle in a way that a course for a team of 12 rarely does.
Why the completion numbers look odd, and what they actually mean
The key point. Courses with three or more authors have the lowest average completion rate and the highest pooled completion rate of any group. That is not a contradiction. It is what happens when a few large, well-built courses sit alongside many small ones.
| 1 author | 2 authors | 3 or more authors | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Completion rate, average per course | 77.9% | 73.7% | 72.9% |
| Completion rate, pooled | 86.3% | 83.4% | 86.9% |
The average per course gives every course equal weight, whether it reached 5 learners or 5,000. The pooled figure gives every learner equal weight, so it reflects what a typical learner actually experienced. For the three-or-more-author group, those two numbers pull in opposite directions. The average is the lowest of any group, and the pooled figure is the highest.
Read together with the reach data, the explanation holds up. The collaborative courses that pull the heaviest traffic complete very well, which is what drives the pooled figure to 86.9%. A number of smaller collaborative courses that reach few learners drag the average down. Co-authoring does not appear to hurt completion. It appears to concentrate on the courses where the stakes justify it, and those courses tend to perform.
What co-authoring replaces
Before an author-first tool made in-platform collaboration fast, the alternative to a single author working alone was usually a much slower handoff process. Nelson Sivalingam, CEO at HowNow and author of Learning at Speed, described the older pattern on Easygenerator’s webinar on AI in L&D.
“As an SME, I can go to Easygenerator and work with the AI to say, I’m dumping my expertise here, but you’ve got the expertise of the pedagogy, and the best way to frame and structure this. It would have taken you weeks to get to something that was pedagogically sound. But now we can get from ‘here’s expertise’ to ‘pedagogically sound learning resource’ very quickly.”
Nelson Sivalingam, CEO, HowNow, speaking on Easygenerator’s webinar on AI in e-learning, May 2026.
That older model, a subject-matter expert handing knowledge to an L&D team and waiting for a finished course, often took weeks before anyone touched it directly. Measured against that baseline, 12.8 days for genuine co-authorship inside one platform is fast. Measured against a solo author’s 3 hours, it is still a real cost, and one worth planning for rather than absorbing as a surprise.
Why the review cycle needs real time
The key point. A rushed review cycle produces worse results than a longer one, because real changes need real room.
The 12.8 days a collaborative course takes is not simply overhead to trim. Derek Bruce, Chief Learning & Knowledge Officer at Easygenerator, made a related point about compressed review cycles during a webinar on localization.
“One of the worst things is to go, here’s our 99.9% finished content. You’ve got a week to make any changes.”
Derek Bruce, Chief Learning & Knowledge Officer, Easygenerator, speaking on Easygenerator’s webinar on localization, March 2026.
The same logic applies inside a single course with multiple authors. A subject-matter expert needs time to check that the content is accurate. A second reviewer needs time to check that it reads well for someone outside the topic. Compressing that into a rushed pass defeats the purpose of bringing in a second or third person at all.
How Signify moved from outsourced content to employee co-creation
Signify, a global lighting company based in Eindhoven with more than 32,000 employees across 70 countries, used to rely on external vendors for most of its e-learning, a process the Learning team found expensive and slow. Jaap Schuuring, Head of Customer Learning at Signify, was initially skeptical that spreading course creation across more people would hold up on quality. After a six-month pilot, the team found the opposite. Around 95% of Signify’s e-learning is now created internally, with employees producing more than 1,400 courses, and the company now counts roughly 5 times more authors and 7 times more courses than it did in 2022.
“By using this course authoring tool we stimulate co-creation and collaboration, it is a real game-changer.”
Jaap Schuuring, Head of Customer Learning, Signify.
Signify’s shift was organization-wide rather than a single-course decision, but the underlying logic matches the platform data closely. Spreading authorship across more contributors cost the Learning team more coordination up front, and it bought them a scale of output a single small team could not have reached alone.
How to decide, match the process to the stakes
The key point. The right number of authors depends on how many people the course needs to reach, not on a fixed rule.
| If your course is for | The data suggests |
|---|---|
| A small team, roughly a dozen people or fewer | One author, published the same day. A review cycle adds a week or more for little gain at this scale. |
| A department or region, into the hundreds | Plan for a second author and roughly a week for review. |
| Several hundred learners or more | Plan for 12 to 13 days with two or more co-authors. The reach and pooled completion figures both favor this scale of investment. |
None of this argues for co-authoring by default. It argues for treating the number of authors as a decision tied to how many people will actually take the course, made before the course goes into production rather than added midway as an afterthought.
What this data cannot tell you
These are observational comparisons, not experiments. Nobody assigned courses to one author or several. Teams appear to choose collaboration for the courses that matter most, so the comparison shows a pattern rather than a controlled test of what collaboration does to an average course.
The 3.4x reach figure is a correlation, not a guarantee. A course does not automatically reach more learners because it has more authors. The data suggests teams add co-authors to courses that were already going to reach more people, and the extra review likely helps those courses hold up at scale.
The sample reflects who uses Easygenerator. Our customers lean toward Employee-generated Learning, where subject-matter experts build courses directly rather than handing material to a central instructional design team. A platform with a different customer base could show different numbers.
Completion is not learning. A learner who completes a course, solo-authored or collaborative, has demonstrated something on the day. This data says nothing about what they remembered a month later.
About Easygenerator
Easygenerator is an AI-powered e-learning suite that helps organizations create company-tailored training at scale. Built for internal experts and L&D teams alike, its author-first AI captures the depth of organizational knowledge and transforms insights, documents, and ideas into didactically sound courses. Teams can create professional training videos with AI avatars and multilingual voiceovers, and help employees practice real workplace conversations to build skills with confidence. With translation into 75+ languages, Easygenerator makes it simple to scale training consistently across the entire organization.
Easygenerator holds a rating of 4.7 out of 5 on G2 across 175 reviews. Pro plans start at $1,399 per year for a single author and Team plans start at $6,995 per year for five authors, with Enterprise pricing available on request for unlimited authors. Courses publish to any LMS through manual and dynamic SCORM, through xAPI native integrations, and more.
